On top of a rise in home invasions, assaults and homicides, Sin City’s ubiquitous gambling taverns are being targeted for stick-ups as well.
Photograph: Valerie Macon/AFP/Getty Images

A 14-year-old girl fended off two home invaders last month in a shootout in a Vegas Valley suburb, picking up her stepfather’s pistol after they were both shot.

On a recent Monday in Las Vegas, five separate armed robberies took place over a four-hour span. In one instance, a victim was pistol-whipped while he and his girlfriend were held hostage in their home.

Days later, Las Vegas police were investigating a jewelry store robbery when they heard gunshots outside. Two teens had just tried to snatch a man’s cellphone at a bus stop then fired a revolver as they fled.

Violent crime – murder, robbery, and sexual assault – is up dramatically in Sin City. The homicide rate has risen 73% – to 38 deaths from 22 – when compared with the same period last year. Overall violent crime is up by 22%.

More than 30 US cities reported significant crime rate increases last year, a trend attributed in some cases to the national heroin epidemic, gang activity, a surge in gun ownership and lingering woes from the recession. Some of that is going on in southern Nevada too, officers say.

But Las Vegas is unique in that its problems have been mostly blamed on policy decisions. According to leaders within the Las Vegas metropolitan police department, their city’s troubles can be attributed to a shortage of uniformed patrolmen, less jail space and California’s effort to reduce prison overcrowding.

“There are a number of things that anecdotally you’d have to look at, as far as what causes some of the crime rate increases,” said Kevin McMahill, Las Vegas metro undersheriff. “I think some of this Proposition 47 stuff where they released a significant number of people in California is part of it. We have seen a significant increase in the number of folks we contact in our gang area who come from California.”

Proposition 47 was California’s 2014 initiative to recategorize some non-violent felony offenses as misdemeanors, and followed a prison realignment program that was passed in 2011 in which some inmates were transferred from state prisons to county jails or released early. Studies have shown that those measures helped reduce prison overcrowding and did not contribute to recent upswings in crime in places like Los Angeles.

However, Charis Kubrin, a criminology professor at UC Irvine, pointed out that “at this point all of this is just simple speculation.”

“It is well known that crime and crime trends are impacted by any number of potential factors,” she added, “including poverty, unemployment, gangs, drug markets, gun availability, police-community relations, demographic population shifts, mental health issues and mental illness – to name just a few. “

In any case, McMahill said his force had arrested enough ex-convicts from California on robbery, shooting and homicide charges to consider it an “influx”.

“In particular, what stands out to me is we’re seeing a lot of people from the Oakland area,” he added. “Sometimes maybe it’s people looking for a fresh start and they come here and they’re right back involved in the same type of activity they may have been released from previously.”

In response to the flare-up, metro is asking detectives and plainclothes officers to don uniforms and participate in patrol duty, an unusual and unpopular decision. Many of them haven’t performed that work in years.

Saturating the most dangerous neighborhoods with uniformed cops may have temporarily helped; Las Vegas went nine days without a homicide after the patrolmen surge began. But critics believe it’s doomed to fail because investigators and undercover cops are being pulled off assignments that lead to major arrests.

“It’s just a feelgood tactic,” said Mark Chaparian, executive director of the Las Vegas Police Protective Association. “In the totality of all this, we’re really going to suffer more because now we don’t have cases being investigated in a timely fashion.”

Edward Maguire, a criminology professor at American University, is equally skeptical. “It’s important to have adequate staffing, particularly at hotspots, but I don’t think it’s necessarily true that patrol is more important than detectives in reducing crime,” he said. “To take someone out of his or her work and stick them doing the other’s job strikes me as a little bizarre.”

At the core of the problem is a lack of jail space – about 600 fewer beds than usual due to a remodeling effort – and a shortage of manpower, McMahill said. His department lost 500 positions during the economic downturn, leaving them with 1.7 cops for every 1,000 residents, when two to 1,000 is the ratio traditionally needed for metro to lower crime. (The national average is 2.18 cops per 1,000 residents.)

Clark County began collecting a “more cops” sales tax in January to fund 350 additional police officer positions. But, as has been the case nationally, recruitment has posed a challenge, McMahill said. And then there is the need to put those new cadets through background checks and training.

“Relief is on the way,” he said. “But we’ve got a period of time before that’s actually going to happen.”

It can’t happen fast enough for the community. On top of a rise in home invasions, assaults and homicides, Sin City’s ubiquitous gambling taverns are being targeted for stick-ups as well.

“Our bar got hit and then another one got robbed down the street,” said Bonnie Hermansen, a bartender at Dylan’s Sports Pub on the city’s eastside. “Then the next night, it was two other bars. It’s a traumatic situation to have a gun put in your face.”

She is considering launching a website for bartenders who are victims of violent crime, a place for them to vent and sympathize. But the rest of the Las Vegas Valley could probably benefit from that type of support network too.

“Everyone is in a nervous state,” said Hermansen. “I mean, your life is on the line every day you come to work. I’m a grandmother with three kids and six grandchildren. My other bartender has her daughter and her grandchildren living with her. We’re regular people, working people who do this because we like serving people. And then you get your life threatened over a couple hundred dollars. It’s very unnerving. Even at the Walmart across the street they were robbed. It’s just everywhere you go it seems to be getting worse.”

This article was amended on 31 March 2016. An earlier version misstated that prison realignment began in California in 2015. It was implemented earlier, in 2011.